The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis

By Jerald E. Podair

“[This] admirably balanced book will most likely stand as the definitive account of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis for some time . . . engrossing.” —New York History
 
Winner of the Allan Nevins Prize awarded by the Society of American Historians
 
On May 9, 1968, junior high school teacher Fred Nauman received a letter that would change the history of New York City. It informed him that he had been fired from his job. Eighteen other educators in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville area of Brooklyn received similar letters that day. The dismissed educators were white. The local school board that fired them was predominantly African-American. The crisis that the firings provoked became the most racially divisive moment in the city in more than a century, sparking three teachers’ strikes and increasingly angry confrontations between black and white New Yorkers at bargaining tables, on picket lines, and in the streets.
 
This superb book revisits the Ocean Hill–Brownsville crisis—a watershed in modern New York City race relations. Jerald E. Podair connects the conflict with the sociocultural history of the city and explores its legacy. The book is a powerful, sobering tale of racial misunderstanding and fear, and a New York story with national implications.
 
“Deftly weaves a complicated story about class and race, labor and civil rights…There are no faultless heroes or thoroughly evil villains here—only human beings struggling to make sense of their world and achieve justice as they understand it.” —Choice
 
“Compelling.” —Washington Monthly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2003
• ISBN: 9780300130706

Book preview

THE STRIKE THAT CHANGED NEW YORK

THE STRIKE THAT CHANGED NEW YORK

Blacks, Whites, and The Ocean Hill–Brownsville Crisis

Jerald E. Podair

Copyright © 2002 by Yale University.

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Podair, Jerald E., 1953-

The strike that changed New York : blacks, whites, and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville crisis/Jerald E. Podair.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

ISBN 0-300-08122-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Strikes and lockouts—Teachers—New York (State)—New York. 2. Ocean Hill–Brownsville Demonstration School District (New York, N.Y.) 3. Discrimination in education—New York (State)—New York. I. Title.

LB2844.47.U62 N4867 2002

331.892′813711′0097471—dc21

2002004315

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Caren and Julie

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: May 9, 1968

1 Two New Yorks: New York City, 1945–1965

2 The Rise of Community

3 Black Values, White Values: Race and Culture in New York City During the 1960s

4 The Ocean Hill–Brownsville Community Control Experiment

5 The Strikes

6 Like Strangers: The Third Strike and Beyond

7 Culture War

8 After the Crisis: Race and Memory

9 Ocean Hill–Brownsville, New York, America

Notes

Sources

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many individuals helped me write this book. I thank them all: Benjamin Alpers, Adina Back, Kathy Baima, Wayne Barrett, Herman Benson, Ronald Bianchi, Pat Bonomi, Lizabeth Cohen, Cynthia Cupples, Ronald Evans, Henry Foner, Murray Friedman, Kevin Gaines, Jeffrey Gerson, John Giggie, Cheryl Greenberg, Judith Hanson, Herbert Hill, James Horton, Tamar Jacoby, Walter Johnson, Phil Katz, Leah Kopcsandy, Liz Lunbeck, Richard Magat, Martin Mayer, Hiram McClendon, Kenneth Mills, Carl Nightingale, Nell Painter, James Patterson, Darryl Peterkin, Norman Podhoretz, Wendell Pritchett, James Ralph, Jack Schierenbeck, Andrew Shankman, Fred Siegel, Jim Sleeper, Christine Stansell, Thomas Sugrue, Clarence Taylor, John Thomas, Don Tobias, Ben Toffolli, Brigitta van Rheinberg, Andrew Weiss, Benjamin Weiss, John Wertheimer, Sean Wilentz, and Henry Yu.

I also thank Mary George, reference librarian at Princeton University’s Firestone Library, for her ongoing enthusiasm for this project, her unsurpassed expertise, and her friendship. Glenn Novarr and Alison Carper filled my research trips to Brooklyn with great food, conversation, and camaraderie. Robert Klein’s generosity of spirit and dry wit have sustained me since we roomed together in college all these many years ago.

I met Bill Reel by chance ten years ago. Since then, he has become one of my dearest friends. His compassion, humor, and faith have helped me through difficult times. I’m privileged to know him.

Lucinda Manning, the United Federation of Teachers archivist, made the union’s Ocean Hill–Brownsville papers available to me in a most generous and forthcoming manner. She has helped me with this project in every possible way. It would not exist without her. Also at the UFT, I thank Evan Daniel for handling my photograph requests with exemplary professionalism and care. The late Debra Bernhardt’s knowledge, kindness, and dedication will be missed by all who study the history of New York City.

David Ment and Bette Wenech presided over my other major archival resource, the New York City Board of Education Papers at Columbia Teachers College, with efficiency, good humor, and courtesy. I truly enjoyed the months I spent with them on 120th Street, as, in David’s words, their best customer. They always made me feel like a guest, not a visitor.

I also thank the members of the Society of American Historians, not only for honoring me with their Alan Nevins Prize, but for the example of their historical writing. They inspired me to become a historian, and I hope that, like them, I can write books that matter.

I am grateful to my colleagues in the Lawrence University Department of History for their friendship and support, and for welcoming this expatriate New Yorker to the Midwest with patience and good humor. Brian Rosenberg, Dean of the Faculty at Lawrence, has been unstintingly generous in providing the funding necessary for the completion of this book. I thank him for the confidence he has shown in it, and in me. My weekly lunches with Gerald Seaman, Associate Dean of the Faculty, have been filled with wonderful conversation and laughter, especially when the two Jerrys sow confusion in restaurants and stores. Also at Lawrence, I thank Vicki Koessl and Joanne Johnson, who prepared the final manuscript with professionalism and skill, and Gina Pirrello, who provided prompt and expert research assistance.

I also thank Professor Anthony Grafton of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University for his generous support of this book.

Gavin Lewis has been an extraordinarily helpful copy editor. His suggestions have made this a much better book than the one I turned over to him. I also thank Larisa Heimert, Keith Condon, and Heidi Downey at Yale University Press, as well as Chuck Grench, for their help in bringing this project to fruition.

My intellectual debts are many. Gary Gerstle believed in this book from the beginning. His advice, support, and friendship made it possible for me to see it through. James McPherson’s sensible, calming words and counsel have meant a great deal to me over the years. I know I am not alone in considering him a role model. Daniel Rodgers helped me understand not only where this book should go, but also what a good historian must do, and, most importantly, why a life in history is the best life of all. Alan Brinkley has gone beyond the call of duty on my behalf on occasions too numerous to mention. He has always provided me with expert advice and criticism, as well as with an example of warmth, empathy, and respect that I hope to emulate with my own students.

My thanks, finally, go to my family. My brother, Lee Podair, gave me confidence from start to finish. My in-laws, Sidney and Florence Benzer, showed me patience and forbearance as this book developed. Simon Podair, my father, was the first to show me the delights of history. By the time I finished high school, he and I had visited virtually every important historical site on the East Coast—all, in the fashion of true New Yorkers, without the benefit of an automobile. I was able to write this book, in large part, because of those days, and because of him. My mother, Selma Podair, passed away in July of 1997. I wish she had lived to see this day. She would have been very proud, but then, she never needed a special occasion to be proud of me. On the subject of pride, I hope my daughter, Julie Podair, will always be as proud of me as I am of her.

My greatest debt is to Caren Benzer. She understood my passion for American history, and my need to make a life of it. Thanks to her, I was able to do so. She has contributed to this book in more ways than I can count. But, more importantly, she has shown me, every day of our lives together, love’s truest meaning. With Caren, wherever I may be, I’m the richest man in town.

THE STRIKE THAT CHANGED NEW YORK

INTRODUCTION

May 9, 1968

Fred Nauman knew something was going to happen. He just didn’t know what it would be. It would, however, involve him; he had no doubt of that. Nauman was a science teacher at Junior High School 271, in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York, a thirty-eight-year-old German Jew whose parents had brought him to America on the eve of World War II. He was a chapter chairman for the union representing New York City’s fifty-five thousand public school teachers, the United Federation of Teachers, known as the UFT. In that role, he had been locked in a year-long battle with the local school board in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville district over what it could and could not do. The local board, elected as part of an experiment in community control of the New York City public schools, had claimed sweeping powers in the district, including the sole right to determine curriculum, control expenditures, and hire and fire personnel.

To Nauman, these demands, especially the last, were outrageous: he was a union man, and the UFT had struggled since its founding in 1960 to give teachers a strong voice in just these areas. Now a local school board—composed of nonprofessionals—was trying to take away what the union had won. Even worse, it was accusing Nauman and the UFT of racism, since the local board, like the Ocean Hill–Brownsville neighborhood itself, was predominantly black, and Nauman, like most in his union, was white. Nonsense, thought Nauman: this wasn’t about race, it was about labor rights. The local board just didn’t seem to understand this. He considered himself a liberal, a civil rights supporter. Why didn’t they understand?

The night before, he had gotten a tip from a UFT higher-up: expect the local board to try something in the morning. He was an obvious target. But would the board actually try to fire him? Firing a tenured teacher in the New York City school system was next to impossible, and only the Superintendent of Schools at central Board of Education headquarters could do it. The last time a local board had fired a teacher—or hired one, for that matter—had been before the city’s schools were centralized in 1898. Nauman had been trying to get this through to the people on the local board all year. They just wouldn’t listen. They seemed to him to go out of their way to provoke and confront. They wouldn’t follow the rules, wouldn’t listen to reason. Now, as he walked into Junior High School 271 on the morning of Thursday, May 9, 1968, he wondered what was next.

A few minutes into his first class, he was asked to report to the principal’s office. When he got there, he was handed an envelope. He opened it and read:

Dear Sir:

The Governing Board of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville Demonstration School District has voted to end your employment in the schools of this District. This action was taken on the recommendation of the Personnel Committee. This termination of employment is to take effect immediately.

In the event you wish to question this action, the Governing Board will receive you on Friday, May 10, 1968, at 6:00 p.m., at Intermediate School 55, 2021 Bergen Street, Brooklyn, New York.

You will report Friday morning to Personnel, 110 Livingston Street, Brooklyn, for reassignment.

Sincerely,

Rev. C. Herbert Oliver, Chairman

Ocean Hill–Brownsville Governing Board

Rhody A. McCoy

Unit Administrator¹

Nauman walked outside, and found a phone, and dialed the number of the UFT’s headquarters in Manhattan.²

Three blocks away, one of the men who had signed the letter on behalf of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville local school board sat at his desk in a makeshift office in the lobby of a public housing project. Rhody McCoy was an early riser, and he had already been at work, omnipresent pipe in hand, for a few hours. He knew the kind of storm the letter Nauman and eighteen other white Ocean Hill–Brownsville educators were opening would cause, but he felt the UFT had given him no choice. McCoy was the Unit Administrator for the Ocean Hill–Brownsville district, responsible for the day-to-day operations of its eight schools. He was forty-two years old, a graduate of Howard University, who had spent his entire working career in the New York City public education system, first as a teacher and later as the principal of a school for emotionally disturbed children in Manhattan. The Ocean Hill–Brownsville local board had hired him as Unit Administrator in July 1967, over the objections of the UFT. The union claimed he lacked the formal requirements for the position, but McCoy believed there was more to it than that. He was a black man with a reputation for quiet independence and an unwillingness to play by bureaucratic rules. This, much more than his lack of high examination scores and graduate credits, was what made the union nervous.

McCoy had taken the Ocean Hill–Brownsville job in large part because he saw it as a way to do something about the educational catastrophe he saw developing in the city’s black community. Black children were not learning. Test scores were abysmal and dropout rates rising. White teachers did not want to teach in black schools. They transferred out to the better white schools as soon as they fulfilled the five-year service requirement. McCoy thought that most white teachers in New York, for all their protests about supporting civil rights and admiring Martin Luther King, didn’t believe in the ability of a black child to learn just as well as a white one.

That was what so excited him about coming to Ocean Hill–Brownsville. The Ocean Hill–Brownsville project was premised on the argument that since the white-dominated educational bureaucracy had failed to teach black children, the black community itself should be given a chance. The central Board of Education had authorized the election of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville local, or governing, board in July 1967, but then spent most of the 1967–68 school year telling it what it could not do. McCoy had spent the year wrangling with Nauman and the UFT teachers over the local board’s powers. The union had objected to the board’s choices for principals in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville schools. It had fought curriculum change. It had tried to stop the local board from controlling its own finances. And it had refused to allow the local board to choose its own teaching personnel. McCoy had begged union leaders to be more flexible. They wouldn’t listen. He had told Nauman and his colleagues that this was an experiment in community control, and if this did not mean control over personnel, finances, and curriculum, what did it mean? They didn’t understand. The union seemed to go out of its way to throw bureaucratic impediments at him. He was trying to be reasonable, but the white teachers wouldn’t meet him halfway.

It was as if they didn’t respect him. Perhaps that was it. He didn’t have proper credentials. Most of the sixteen members of the local board were women; many were on welfare. Nauman and the union didn’t think they were professional enough. Or, maybe they just weren’t white enough, perhaps that was the problem. In any case, a few days before, McCoy and the local board had decided to do something about it. They had met and made a list of the educators in the district who were the most hostile to community control. Nauman was one of them; so were eighteen others, many conspicuously active in the UFT. McCoy and the local board had drafted a letter ordering each out of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville district. They would run the schools in their community—not the union, the central Board of Education, or anyone else. The letter, which Fred Nauman was reading in the principal’s office that morning, would see to that. And white people would respect them; the letter would see to that as well. Back at his office Rhody McCoy sat at his desk, puffed on his pipe, and waited for all hell to break loose.

The Ocean Hill–Brownsville school controversy, which began in earnest with Rhody McCoy’s letter to Fred Nauman on May 9, 1968, was at its core the story of black and white New Yorkers who spoke different languages to each other, like strangers. Unlike many accounts of the civil rights movement during the 1960s, it offers few clear-cut heroes or villains. In a sense, this story is all the more troubling for its lack of a clear moral compass. The Ocean Hill–Brownsville controversy showed black and white New Yorkers to be profoundly at odds over the very shape and definition of human relations in the city. What did racism mean? What was equality? What cultural values would prevail in a pluralistic city? What did it mean to be middle-class? And, more broadly, what principles would govern the distribution of resources in a fair, just city?³

The differences between blacks and whites over these questions that surfaced at Ocean Hill–Brownsville were not the work of unscrupulous demagogues or racial racketeers: they were too deep-seated and heartfelt for this. They would affect New York’s social and class relations, electoral alignments, fiscal policies, labor negotiations, and political culture for decades to come. Indeed, they echo in the life of the city today. The idea that blacks and whites view the same circumstances and events in different ways is now something of a commonplace. Ocean Hill–Brownsville’s historical significance for New York lies in the fact that this perceptual gulf first came into the open there, shaking a city that prided itself on its tolerance, open-mindedness, and humane liberalism.

It is also significant that New York’s white population discovered at Ocean Hill–Brownsville that they and the city’s black community were speaking different languages. Whites like Fred Nauman were genuinely shocked to find this to be the case. Nauman and thousands of white middle-class New Yorkers like him espoused a liberalism that was integrationist, cosmopolitan, and humanist. It assumed that a consensus existed in New York City built around a set of basic principles held by both blacks and whites: individualism within a broadly pluralistic setting, equality of opportunity, and a race-blind, meritocratic approach to the distribution of societal rewards. But Ocean Hill–Brownsville revealed a black community that was deeply ambivalent about those values. Indeed, many in that community—including many middle-class blacks—viewed them as fraudulent and hypocritical in their practical application. At Ocean Hill–Brownsville, blacks punished white New Yorkers for assuming they both believed in the same things, and for attempting to do their thinking for them. There was no consensus in New York in 1968—Ocean Hill–Brownsville made that abundantly clear to a shocked white community.

The anger with which whites reacted to this discovery had far-reaching consequences for race and class relations in the city. Politically, it led to a fundamental electoral realignment. For decades, New York’s politics had been defined largely by a rivalry between Jews and Catholics. As recently as 1963, this rivalry had been one of the major themes of Glazer and Moynihan’s seminal Beyond the Melting Pot, where they argued that there is probably a wider gap between Jews and Catholics in New York today than in the days of Al Smith.⁴ New York City’s reputation as perhaps the nation’s quintessential liberal city rested on a political alliance of Jews, blacks, and white Protestants arrayed against conservative Irish and Italian Catholics. During the bitter regular vs. reform battles of the 1950s and early 1960s, Jewish political acumen and electoral muscle were crucial in bringing down the Tammany Hall machine that had symbolized Catholic political power for almost a century.

Jewish-Catholic divisions during this period were rooted in culture, in sharply contrasting worldviews. Glazer and Moynihan described the two groups as separated by two value systems: a secular, rationalist Jewish ethos, and a traditionalist, religious-based Catholic counterpart.⁵ There seemed little chance, at the height of this rivalry in the early 1960s, of accommodation between the two. Yet, thanks in large part to the events of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville crisis, this is exactly what occurred.⁶ By 1970, so-called outer-borough Jews—middle- and lower middle-class Jews residing outside of Manhattan—had bridged what only a few years before had appeared to be insurmountable political and cultural differences with white Catholics. Ocean Hill–Brownsville brought an end to the ambivalence of outer-borough Jews as to the extent and nature of their white identity, and they now viewed themselves almost wholly in white terms. Outer-borough Jews and white Catholics had begun to forge a race-based alliance that would shift the electoral politics of the city rightward. It would provide a popular mandate for the municipal spending reductions of New York’s fiscal crisis of 1975–82 that disproportionately impacted the city’s black community.

Before the Ocean Hill–Brownsville crisis, the city’s political landscape was customarily described as a pluralistic mix of race, ethnicity, religion, and class.⁷ Afterwards, Glazer and Moynihan observed in their rueful introduction to the 1970 edition of Beyond the Melting Pot that race has exploded to swallow up all other distinctions. Ocean Hill–Brownsville destroyed the myth of New York as a pluralistic city; its identity now lay in stark shades of black and white. While Jewish and Catholic value systems still existed, they were now of secondary importance: black and white frames of reference had superseded them. Ocean Hill–Brownsville, which Glazer and Moynihan described as the great divide in race relations in New York, had redefined the city’s political and cultural landscape.⁸

The black and white perspectives or languages that the events of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville controversy illuminated clashed in three important respects. First, the controversy was the occasion for an angry debate between black and white educators over the operative definitions of the words equality and racism in the context of the city’s public education system. The two groups offered sharply divergent explanations for the low level of academic achievement among black students, as well as for the relatively low number of black teachers and administrators in the system. The hostility of black educators like Rhody McCoy toward Fred Nauman and his white colleagues was fueled by their antipathy to the civil service examination system under which white teachers had advanced their careers. The attack by black educators on this system was, in effect, an argument for a definition of equality and racism that was institutionally based and results-oriented. The defense of the examination apparatus by white teachers as a guarantor of color-blind merit was emblematic of another, more individuated, understanding of these terms.

Ocean Hill–Brownsville was also the site of a dispute between black and white educators over the shape and definition of pluralism in city life. This dispute centered around different approaches to the teaching of black history in the city’s pubic schools. Black teachers, notably those associated with the radical African-American Teachers Association, mounted a challenge to a UFT-endorsed treatment that sought to locate blacks within the historical trajectories of white immigrants, and generally, to downplay the consequences of group difference. Their challenge offered instead a radicalized version of pluralism, in which group identity—especially racial group identity—was accorded primary, formalized recognition, and which viewed groups, not individuals, as the defining units of American society.

Finally, the Ocean Hill–Brownsville controversy was the venue for a critique by black educators of the culture and values associated with the middle class in New York, notably individualism, competition, and materialism. The critique sought to link these values specifically to whites in the city, and generally, to the idea of whiteness, in a significant departure from past practice. Black educators attempted to replace this white middle-class culture with an alternative one based on what they saw as traditional black values: mutuality, cooperation and community. Many whites, however, viewed this not as a search for a uniquely black middle-class culture, but as a rejection of middle-class values in their entirety. Once again, whites and blacks were divided in their understandings of and reactions to the same terms and ideas.

The Ocean Hill–Brownsville controversy, then, was about much more than whether Rhody McCoy, a black educator, could fire Fred Nauman, a white one. It was about how blacks and whites, with markedly different ideas about what equality, pluralism, and being middle-class meant, fought for their visions of a fair and just city, and what their different languages meant for the politics and culture of the city in the 1970s and beyond. Ocean Hill–Brownsville did not itself create two New Yorks—one black, one white, divided politically, socially, and culturally. It was, however, their most visible, palpable symbol.

Its significance lies in this symbolic quality, as a destroyer of illusions. Until Ocean Hill–Brownsville, many New Yorkers, especially whites, believed in New York as an exercise in cosmopolitan humanism, a pluralistic city broadly integrated along racial, ethnic, and religious lines. Indeed, by the early 1960s, this had become something of a civic mantra, to the point that Glazer and Moynihan, themselves pluralists, felt constrained to warn in Beyond the Melting Pot that New Yorkers still retained strong elements of provincialism and tribalism, and that the city was not a cosmopolitan paradise. But nothing they might have written could have prepared New York for the shock of Ocean Hill–Brownsville, and the discovery of the magnitude of the gulf that separated blacks and whites. Before Ocean Hill–Brownsville, Glazer and Moynihan argued that there were many New Yorks, and not just one. In its wake, as blacks and whites spoke past each other, it was clear that they had miscalculated: there were two.

To understand why a letter written to a junior high school science teacher in Brooklyn had such far-reaching consequences for New York City, then, it is necessary to understand how the two New Yorks the letter symbolized came to exist. During the two decades following World War II, the demographics, class structure, and economic base of New York City underwent profound shifts which affected blacks and whites in markedly different ways. By the mid-1960s, these shifts had created two distinct worlds in the city: a white one that was upwardly mobile, educationally successful, and culturally dominant, and a black one that was geographically isolated, economically undeveloped, educationally unsuccessful, and culturally marginalized. The road leading to Rhody McCoy’s letter to Fred Nauman began with the creation of these racial worlds, and these two New Yorks.

1

TWO NEW YORKS

New York City, 1945–1965

In 1945, New York was a blue-collar, working-class city. In 1965, it was a white-collar, middle-class one. The economic, social, and cultural divisions that eventually caused the Ocean Hill–Brownsville conflict had their roots in this elemental shift. The face of New York changed profoundly in this twenty-year period; in many ways, it became a new city. New York’s economic base shifted from manufacturing to service industries. Its corporate, financial, real estate, legal, insurance, and banking sectors boomed, expanding white-collar employment opportunities. The city spent prodigiously on state services, creating thousands of new government jobs. And government housing policies spurred an upsurge in the construction of middle-income rental and cooperative apartment units both in Manhattan and the outer boroughs of the city. This shift created a new middle class in New York. It was composed largely of those from working-class and impoverished backgrounds, who were the first in their families to work in a coat and tie. But New Yorkers did not share these new opportunities equally. The city’s new middle class was composed primarily of whites, not blacks. The uneven black and white rates of participation in this process of middle-class formation between 1945 and 1965 would create the two New Yorks that the Ocean Hill–Brownsville controversy symbolized.

In 1945, New York City was the premier industrial city in the United States. It had more manufacturing jobs than any other American city; in fact, it had more such jobs than any two other American cities combined.¹ This industrial preeminence did not immediately meet the eye, however, overshadowed as it was by the city’s reputation as an intellectual and cultural center. New York had no single dominant industry, equivalent to steel in Pittsburgh or automobiles in Detroit. Instead the city boasted thousands of relatively small, decentralized factories in a variety of fields—apparel, printing, small machinery, toys, and paper products, among others.

These industries were housed in buildings which often did not resemble factories in the commonly accepted sense. They were not self-contained and surrounded by fences and parking lots, but rather tenement-style buildings intermixed with residential housing and office buildings. Often, an industrial building contained a series of manufacturers in unrelated fields, reducing efficiency and snarling traffic on narrow city cross-streets.² While dirty, unsightly, and environmentally hazardous, these multistory factories provided employment to over a million New Yorkers, approximately 40 percent of the city’s total working population.³ Moreover, the vast majority of these jobs required little or no education. A New York City high school dropout in 1945 had options in semiskilled or unskilled employment—grueling, repetitive, and sometimes dangerous, to be sure—but viable employment nonetheless. Thousands of such dropouts poured into the city’s economy each year, riding subways to midtown and downtown Manhattan, where many of these jobs were located.

Outsiders may have misapprehended New York’s status as a manufacturing center, but city leaders did not. They took measures to protect and encourage industry, including keeping subway fares low to expedite the flow of workers to their jobs, and exercising a relative leniency in zoning practices that made downtown Manhattan an anarchic mix of factories, offices, and apartments.⁴ New York City in 1945 may well have been an urban planner’s nightmare, but for a man without an education who worked with his hands, it was a relatively hospitable place.⁵ It was no workers’ paradise, to be sure, but it was unquestionably a thriving working-class city.

All this changed after World War II, as the city’s economy shifted from a reliance on manufacturing and port activities to one based on the provision of services. Municipal leaders began to view the tenement buildings that housed small factories as hazardous eyesores that destroyed the ambience of the city. The years after 1945 in New York were dominated by urban renewal.⁶ High-rise office buildings and white-collar employees began to replace tenement factories and working-class New Yorkers. These were also years in which centralization as an operational and philosophical tenet of municipal governance went virtually unchallenged in city life. In this view, a decentralized series of small factories scattered around downtown Manhattan made no sense. They were in the way, as were, for that matter, neighborhoods anywhere in New York that stood in the path of the city’s new direction. Between 1945 and 1965, the man who did the most to bring this new vision of the city to fruition was Robert Moses.

Moses wielded unprecedented power during this period. He served at various times—and often simultaneously—as chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, head of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance, City Parks Commissioner, and New York City Coordinator of Construction.⁷ Moses’ vision was that of an efficient and clean city that offered a high quality of life to its residents. Quality of life, to Moses, meant most of all the absence of slums, whether residential or commercial. Moses’ New York would be a city of office buildings, not factories; of white-collar jobs, not blue. Under his influence, midtown New York underwent a high-rise office building construction boom in the late 1940s and 1950s. During this time, the city became the corporate headquarters of the world.⁸ Changes in zoning regulations, subsidies, and tax incentives spurred private real estate construction. This public-private partnership changed the landscape of the city. High-rise offices, hospitals, university buildings, and cultural centers replaced tenement apartments and factories.⁹

More than just the city’s physical landscape changed as a result of Moses’ vision. The manufacturing jobs provided by the tenement factories began to disappear or relocate, replaced by those connected with the service industries housed by the new developments. Between 1945 and the early 1970s, New York lost almost half of its jobs in the manufacturing sector.¹⁰ During roughly the same period, it added approximately 350, 000 white-collar jobs.¹¹ Employment in finance, insurance, and real estate grew by almost 30 percent during the 1960s, with the securities industry alone adding 60, 000 jobs.¹² Unlike those they replaced, these white-collar jobs required education—high school at a minimum, and often more.

The other growth industry in New York during the two decades following World War II was government. The city bureaucracy grew steadily, and with it opportunities for employment. The public sector added 155, 000 jobs and grew by 38 percent during the 1960s, and by the latter part of the decade New York’s proportion of government workers per 10, 000 residents was higher than in any other American city except Washington, D.C.¹³ Like the jobs created in the private service sector, these civil service jobs had educational prerequisites; most demanded the ability to pass written examinations.

The years between 1945 and 1965, then, saw New York shift from an economy based on manufacturing to one centered around service industries and government.¹⁴ A 1960 Harvard University study of the changing New York economy bore this out. It predicted that the new service-oriented jobs being created in the city would counterbalance those lost in the manufacturing area.¹⁵ Whether this would prove true or not—and the events of the 1970s would certainly call these forecasts into question—it was clear that New York’s shift to a postindustrial economy was profoundly affecting class and racial relations in the city. It was, on the one hand, creating an upwardly mobile, mostly white, middle class, positioned by education and training to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by the expanding service and government sectors.¹⁶ On the other hand, the city’s growing black population, trapped by de facto residential and educational segregation, failing public schools, and a shrinking unskilled job market, was falling further behind, and separating out into social, political, and cultural isolation. These two parallel trends, both the result of the deindustrialization of New York, would define the racial politics of the city in the 1960s, and eventually lead to the Ocean Hill–Brownsville crisis.

The new middle class of New York City’s postwar